The University and the Global Knowledge Society

David John Frank, John W. Meyer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780691202051
  9780691202068
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691202075
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

How the university went global and became the heart of the information age

The university is experiencing an unprecedented level of success today, as more universities in more countries educate more students in more fields. At the same time, the university has become central to a knowledge society based on the belief that everyone can, through higher education, access universal truths and apply them in the name of progress. This book traces the university's rise over the past hundred years to become the cultural linchpin of contemporary society, revealing how the so-called ivory tower has become profoundly interlinked with almost every area of human endeavor.

David John Frank and John Meyer describe how, as the university expanded, student and faculty bodies became larger, more diverse, and more empowered to turn knowledge into action. Their contributions to society underscored the public importance of scholarship, and as the cultural authority of universities grew they increased the scope of their research and teaching interests. As a result, the university has become the bedrock of today's information-based society, an institution that is now implicated in the solution to every conceivable problem.

But, as Frank and Meyer also show, the conditions that helped spur the university's recent ascendance are not immutable: eruptions of nationalism, authoritarianism, and illiberalism undercut the university's universalistic and rationalistic premises, and may threaten the centrality of the university itself.

1

The University as a World Institution

The university has prospered to an astonishing extent over a millennium, and especially over the last half century. It has grown in numbers, reach, and scope, and it has diffused worldwide. In this book, we reflect on the university’s sweeping expansion and its centrality in a contemporary global society built on liberal and neoliberal institutions.¹ We delineate multiple dimensions of expansion, giving special attention to the growing cultural content included in the university and in a public society deeply intertwined with the university. We attend both to those entities that claim explicit university status and to those—like many “colleges”—whose credentials and content are clearly oriented to the university world. In both cases, the local organizations gain their authority and credibility through their membership in a great imagined now-global institution: the university.

Thus, while it is common to refer, in social discourse and in social scientific research, to particular local organizations as universities, and to particular professors or graduates as members of specific organizations, this is substantially misleading. The local organization in fact gains its standing because it is an instance of something much larger—the university as an institution. And while the professors and graduates may appear to come from a particular local organization, their social status—registered in every role they play through life and into their obituaries—is mainly as members of this grand institution.² Thus the impact of the university on their own lives (and society) transcends the impact of the particular local organization in which they may have studied or worked. It lasts through the whole life span and beyond. Local university organizations may fail, and are certainly often ineffective, but their graduates are still certified graduates. They are likely to be very conscious of this, as are those around them. The point is central to sociological institutional theory.³

This defining feature of the university, throughout its long history, is partly implied in its name—which is employed practically everywhere (e.g., universiteit, unibertsitate, and universitas, in Afrikaans, Basque, and Javanese, respectively). Its special jurisdiction is a peculiar form of understanding claiming status as knowledge. Unlike other forms of understanding, such as intuition or experience, academic knowledge is seen to be universal, holding across time and space. It is furthermore explanatory and thus presupposes a general underlying base in some form of rationality or lawfulness. Knowledge, as seen in the university world, also maintains an appearance of unity and coherence, such that it seems reasonable to include wildly diverse ideas under one organizational and cultural umbrella: any particular university organization—even one named after a special icon, saint, or place—does not claim a distinctive knowledge base. Knowledge is thus a feature of the university as an institution, and a local organization because of its linkage to the institution.

Knowledge is not only seen as universal and rational and unified but is also deemed to be comprehensible by all those everywhere who have gone through the appropriate rituals of education. It is ultimately the same for everybody—across a world with great variation in other aspects of culture and resources—and is in principle (and increasingly in practice) accessible by properly socialized people across the widest range of circumstances. These people are, thus, importantly members of the great institution of the university, not only or primarily of specific organizational instances of it. And they are seen—and are likely to see themselves—as permanently linked to the knowledge of the university. Their occupational, political, economic, and social statuses rest on it, as do their self-conceptions: their experiences are filtered through these social and psychological identities.

Powerful cultural assumptions, religious in origins and still quasi-religious in character, are involved here, constituting the university’s distinctive cultural foundations. The institution’s religion-like quality remains elusive if religion is conceived strictly as nonrational beliefs held by individual persons. It makes more sense when religion includes the cultural cosmologies or “sacred canopies” that have been so central to the definition of religion historically and anthropologically. The latter provide the roots of the university and the academic knowledge it carries.⁴

Originally especially Western, many cosmological assumptions at the heart of the university have spread around the world in the current period, as is emphasized by the sociological neo-institutionalism that provides the theoretical grounding for this book.⁵ Most significantly:

1. There is the idea of a great and expanding body of knowledge that is universally or ultimately true. It is based on an underlying (and expanding) cosmological supposition that many aspects of reality occur under conditions or terms that are the same everywhere and always. No one imagines, for example, that gravity is culturally or historically contingent (though it turns out that it might be). An implication is that there is a singular source of being.
2. There is the idea that the terms of natural and social life are not only universal but also logically structured and causally interconnected. This implies that the source of being in the cosmos is rational, establishing regular relationships between cause and effect and between antecedent and consequent. The gods involved, that is, are not crazy, and bestow basic causal order on an integrated reality.
3. There is the idea that knowledge is coherent and unified and can be examined, learned, and taught under one cultural and organizational frame. This implies that there is no segmentation among specific bodies of true knowledge; Zeus and Poseidon are reconciled. Ultimately, knowledge folds into one.
4. There is the idea that individual humans everywhere can in principle acquire true knowledge. It is not inscrutable or forbidden. This implies a universal and very strong status for properly saved or elevated (i.e., educated⁶) persons, across widely disparate social groups and increasingly across status barriers such as nationality, race, and gender. Humans can, in principle, apprehend the universal truths. And once properly certified, the schooled human is treated as in permanent possession of the relevant knowledge. Diplomas, mattering greatly in social life, are rarely rescinded. Occupational success may be followed by subsequent failure: educational success is permanent.

These assumptions, secularized, help constitute the cosmological foundations of the university. Contemporary universities are often contrasted with, and even opposed to, what are now narrowly conceptualized as religious institutions. But these are near competitors. Fundamentally, both institutions make the same promise: to explain the fundamental nature of being by interpreting local facts in light of transcendent truths.⁷ And both institutions have encompassing reach, covering everything from the genesis of the Earth and the origins of life down to the properties of bacteria. Understanding the university on these terms, as built on foundations reflecting and parallel to religious ones, helps us understand its trajectory over time.

First, a religious or cosmological imagery helps explain why the university has survived intact over hundreds of years from its medieval origins through the whole current period. The secularized social differentiation that is often held up as the hallmark of modernity is seen to involve increasingly specialized understandings in increasingly specific domains. Perhaps, therefore, we should expect teaching and inquiry to differentiate into distinct educational organizations for different sectors of society. But this happens only very partially and mainly internally to the university. Instead of fragmenting, the university expands as a grand umbrella, coming to shelter ever more cultural materials (encompassing, for instance, the once vulgar matters of moneymaking and sexual behavior). It is only when we recognize the cultural impulse to tie local (often occupational) understandings to universal truths that we can appreciate why the university persists and rises as a focal institution in an increasingly globalized but “stateless” and fragmented world. Skilled techniques can be, and mostly are, mastered with real-world practice. Understanding how specific techniques relate to universal knowledge (e.g., how bean counting relates to accounting) requires something called education.

Second, a framework sensitive to the close parallels with religion helps explain why the university, in quite standardized form, has diffused globally, across societies varying greatly in local beliefs and resources. One now finds universities—recognizably similar, at least in aspiration—in countries of every stripe and stratum. This makes sense only if one remembers that the university’s priorities are not local needs and realities but surpassing truths.⁸ As generalized visions of society envelop every community and embrace the whole world—economically, politically, and socially—the universalized knowledge system does too, rooting all kinds of people and activities in a common bed of knowledge. Circumstances vary, but the truth does not.

Third, seeing the parallel with religion helps explain why the university extends to encompass so many more people, across every identity and role. Social and occupational differentiation occurs everywhere and increases everywhere. But increasingly over the modern (post-1800), high modern (post-1945), and hyper-modern (post-1990) periods, the great bulk of differentiation occurs on a standardized foundation of personhood and under the standardized umbrella of universal knowledge.⁹ New and old identities and roles—including those once sequestered in family and community life—can and now must be understood to occur under general laws based on universal truths. Thus, for example, educated women are thought to make better mothers, in part because they are prepared to consult a wide variety of even more educated professionals in medicine, psychology, schooling, recreation, and law.¹⁰

Fourth, conceiving of the university in cosmological terms helps explain why it continuously swallows up bodies of formerly segmented cultural content. With the rise of the “knowledge society,” all sorts of idiosyncratic meaning systems are re-established on rationalized and universalized grounds¹¹. The cultural content of the university thus expands, enabling the organized polity and the monetarized economy—long since heavily standardized—to incorporate the widest array of materials, many far removed from power and production. If anti-liberal movements in the world continue to prosper as they have since 2010, this process may slow, but over recent decades the growth has been dramatic: even the work of sociologists is now counted as part of the GDP.

Our approach to the university here runs parallel to our approach to contemporary society, and especially the global knowledge society, which is grounded in the same cultural elements that undergird the university. Both are built on assumptions of standardized and rationalized universalism. Just as nature in one place is analyzed as if it were comparable to nature in others, so also, strikingly, is social structure, so that good economic or public policy in one country, justified by economic and political science, is good policy elsewhere and everywhere.¹² Professionals, whose roles are justified in terms of putatively universal truths, reign throughout.¹³ Especially in the era of hyper-modernity, contemporary society shares its cultural undergirding with the university. While it is surely differentiating, society is at the same time anchored in the universalized and unified cultural sediment of the university.

Conceiving of the university in quasi-religious terms helps explain its worldwide explosion. But much of the academic and policy literature takes a different approach, seeing the university as a technical-functional apparatus, expected to produce skilled labor and specialized information useful for real-world economic and political practices.¹⁴ Of course, some operations of the university directly impact technical roles and functions in society. But the institution and its meaning system are generally decoupled from immediate utility, opening a knowledge umbrella over local life rather than creating its controls and instrumentation.

The conventional approach to the university leads to a heavy emphasis on variations in the university’s formal organizational structure, as seen in the substantial literatures focusing on loci of power, governance, and decisio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The University as a World Institution
• 2. The Worldwide Instantiation of the University
• 3. The University Population in World Society and University Organizations
• 4. The Societal Culture of University Knowledge
• 5. The Human Actor and the Expansion of Academic Knowledge
• 6. The Expanded University and the Knowledge Society: Linkages and Boundaries
• 7. Reflections on the Global Knowledge Society
• Notes
• References
• Index